Realism
What the domain covers
Realism (c. 1840–1880, mainly France) tests art's response to industrialization, revolution, and photography. The exam asks you to identify anti-idealizing subject matter, the politics of scale, and the difference between Realism and neighboring movements such as Barbizon naturalism and Impressionism.
Core rules
- Subject over ideal: laborers, peasants, laundresses, and contemporary events replace gods, saints, and history heroes.
- Scale as argument: Courbet paints a provincial funeral and a studio allegory on the scale of history painting, collapsing the academic hierarchy of genres.
- Context: 1848 revolutions, positivism, the 1839 daguerreotype, the illustrated press, and the 1863 Salon des Refusés.
- Key figures: Courbet (Stone Breakers, 1849, destroyed; Burial at Ornans, 1849–50; The Artist's Studio, 1855), Millet (The Gleaners, 1857), Daumier (Third-Class Carriage, c. 1862–64), Rosa Bonheur (The Horse Fair, 1853), and in the U.S. Eakins (The Gross Clinic, 1875) and Homer.
- Method: earthy palettes, visible brushwork and palette-knife passages, unposed-looking figures, and direct observation, sometimes aided by photographs.
Worked example
Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, Salon of 1850–51. The canvas is roughly 10 by 22 feet, yet the subject is an ordinary funeral in the artist's native Franche-Comté. Mourners and clergy form a frieze around an open grave; faces are individualized and unflattering, a dog wanders in, and no figure commands the center. The horizon is low and the palette muted. Critics called it ugly and socialist; Courbet called it living art. Reasoning: the painting does not just depict common people - it grants them the scale, seriousness, and public exposure reserved for history painting, which is the Realist gesture.
Traps that cost marks
- Equating Realism with photorealism; it is a program about truth and class, not technical finish.
- Blurring Realism into Impressionism: Monet's broken color and leisure subjects serve different aims.
- Treating Millet's peasants as identical to Courbet's politics; Millet is more elegiac, Courbet more provocative.
- Saying photography 'caused' Realism; it changed visual habits and evidence, but the roots are social and political.
- Attributing 'show me an angel and I'll paint one' to Courbet without noting it is attributed.
- Assuming Realism ended in 1870; it recurs in the Ashcan School and Social Realism.